The Psychology of Black Stereotypes in White America

Psychology buffs are probably familiar with the Implicit Association Test. In laboratory experiments testing for racial prejudice, subjects are timed in their matching of positive and negative words with either white or black faces. In these tests, whites overwhelmingly react more positively to whites and more negatively towards blacks (take the test here).

The reason is that many whites lack personal "real world" experience with blacks and instead much of their perception of blacks is colored by unfair media portrayals (see this report I authored last year.) The torrent of media images of blacks as poor, lazy, and dangerous reinforce negative associations in the mental databank of Americans. Split second judgments as well as the interpretation of subsequent media information depends heavily on these strong perceptual screens.

Research, however, suggests that a change in media portrayals might partially mitigate Americans' racial bias. For example, if subjects are first shown a picture of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, bias scores on the Implicit Association Test are lower.

In sum, the findings of the IAT goes back to the miserly nature of the public, which I have written about at this blog and in various recent articles. Whether it is climate change or electoral politics, if you want to shape the perceptions of Americans, you have to understand and adapt to how they are most likely to process information.

University of Washington psychologist Tony Greenwald, the creator of the Implicit Association Test, appeared last week on NPR's On the Media to discuss the implications of his research for the Obama campaign. Here's what he had to say (audio above, transcript below):

TONY GREENWALD: First, let me say whenever you hear a politician say, you know, it's the policies that are going to influence the voters - taxation, health care, education, Social Security, etc. - you know, my research doesn't take me there at all. I think it's not the policies. I think it's the simple associations.

For example, what do we know about Biden? Well, some people know details about him. But if there's a sound bite that he came away with, it's "goes home to Wilmington every night." That's a great sound bite in terms of associating him with good things, like home. And notice, he's not associated with Washington, D.C., which some politicians want to distance themselves from, but rather Wilmington.

And I heard a phrase at the convention that I am sure is going to come up a lot, and that is "a race for the future." For Obama to get an association of himself with the future and try to link McCain to the past, those are simple associations that could work very well. And if you're going to have a race, you actually want a young guy to be doing the running. [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what do you think we can take away from this research, that most of us are, on some subconscious level, just immovably racist? I mean, that's depressing.

TONY GREENWALD: I wouldn't say that. I do think that we have associations with race that will influence our behavior even though we don't want those associations to influence our behavior. In fact, I'm convinced that race is importantly involved in this presidential election. Just how it's going to play out we don't exactly know. We are in uncharted territory. We have never had a campaign and an election like this.